An Angerous Engineer

Hierarchy in the Forest by Cristopher Boehm is literally about this. In short, we’ve always had some kind of “hierarchy”, but starting at about 3 million years ago, and becoming ubiquitous at around 300,000 years ago, we “inverted” the hierarchy so that domineering individuals were ostracized, and everybody else was more or less equal. In other words, we found a way to be egalitarian, despite our despotic roots as a species - and we did it for long enough to significantly impact the human genome.

Then the domineering individuals started to figure out how to undo this and form dominance hierarchies again, starting about 40,000 years ago.

Only 4000 years ago? That is much more recent than I would have expected (I am familiar with humanity’s egalitarian roots prior to agriculture, but most everything I know about after the adoption of agriculture are societies that were either always hierarchical, or became hierarchical over time). How did they manage to escape notice from the more aggressively imperialist societies long enough to build such a city? How did they manage to police themselves in such a way as to avoid forming a dominance hierarchy themselves? They would have to have had some way of reliably identifying domineering individuals and acting against them in order to actually reverse the inequality trend like that. How did they ultimately fall?

Also, do you happen to have a link/citation for the academic paper that this article is referencing? I don’t even see the name mentioned in the article text - only the author and university.

I think that others have done a sufficient job of answering the main question. I have things to say about the secondary questions:

how badly damaged is it?

I am wondering how it would be possible to reverse or remove that opinion of so many.

I’ve actually put quite a bit of thought into this problem. Countering the intentional destruction of language in general seems to be basically impossible to do directly because of how many people there are who have no particular interest in figuring out what the word really means, and who just perpetuate the current zeitgeist via sheer inertia. It also doesn’t help that there are a great many who claim to be anarchists who actually want the term to be misunderstood. The nihilistic version of anarchism that you’re calling out is perfect for sociopathic individuals who want a world without accountability.

My conclusion is that the word itself has become effectively destroyed and unusable (except in contexts where you know that your audience is made of the small subset of people who actually understand what it is supposed to mean) and needs to be replaced. However, attempting to just invent a new term for the same ideas won’t quite work either, because it will just be equated to the old one, and destroyed by the very same actors as before. We may be able to buy some time, but we need to do something about the forces that work to destroy the language itself if we want a lasting solution.

We need to learn how to protect ourselves from the actors that consistently sabotage our efforts to communicate, form communities and institutions, and actually accomplish objectives. We need to learn how to recognize those actors reliably, and keep them out of our spaces. Feds and such aren’t really the main issue here - it’s the people that claim to be our allies but instead subvert our rhetoric and activity to their own selfish ends that we need to be most wary of.

Once we can keep our spaces clean, we’ll have control over our language again, and we can use a new term or the old one. Those who are actually interested in doing good can be kept safe from the interference of bad-faith actors as long as they are able to find their way into these spaces.

You want to learn about narcissism, narcissistic abuse, and, in particular, what happens to the victims of sustained narcissistic abuse. The victims end up suffering from ‘codependency’ or ‘self-love deficit disorder’ depending on who you talk to. Your mention of ‘pathologically stable attachment’ is pretty close to talking about one real aspect of codependency. There are attachment disorders (like anxious attachment disorder) that will cause people to hyper-attach to others (especially abusers).

I do not say this to name-call, per se - but rather to give you some keywords that you can use to learn more about what’s going on. I will also recommend this youtuber, and in particular her Glossary of Narcissistic Relationships playlist. She’s also written books if you would prefer that format instead. Most information on this topic focuses on interpersonal relationships (intimate ones, especially), but it is trivially applicable to other (larger) contexts.

One of the best things you can do for someone who is suffering from codependency is to help them learn about narcissistic abuse, so that they are even able to recognize what is being done to them. A big part of the apathy that you are observing in people is just plain normalization. They literally don’t even recognize that they are being abused. Once you get past this barrier, helping them heal from the trauma and develop far healthier responses to abusive situations becomes a whole lot easier.

This argument could be made much simpler by observing that centrism is simply the middle of the road fallacy turned into an ideology. As the middle of the road fallacy is unsound by definition, any positions taken on the basis of such an argument are liable to have nothing to do with reality, and any decisions made by such an argument are likely to have unintended or harmful consequences.

Of course, some people will also hide behind this argument because they want to use certain extremes as strawmen so that they can use centrism as a smokescreen to hide the true toxicity of their real beliefs that they want to push. In these cases, the middle of the road fallacy will often be accompanied by many other fallacies as well.

In any case, it should be sufficient to point out the fallacious/illogical nature of their ideology and arguments to show that these people should not be listened to or taken seriously at all. (It isn’t sufficient in practice, because most people are too far removed from reality/epistemological soundness to be saved, but it should be. It will be for anyone with a functioning brain in their heads.)